18 Birthday poems

i made the same cake every year chocolate with the lopsided frosting they never let me forget it was lopsided they asked for it again this year lopsided and everything i made it lopsided on purpose

For your birthday, I’m learning to pop champagne corks with a cossack sword when all you asked for was world peace. I’m actioning the deliverables to wish you many happy returns of the ecstasies that are imminent when all you requested was a contentment so quiet it’s inaudible. Remember when I gave you a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle? When all you desired was to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. And when you said I gave you what I wanted myself  I gave you what I didn’t want: gift certificates to spas that wax hearts, a blind date with the inventor of friction. Today I bring an actual-size sunrise and many glow words from the inmates of  this late-stage civilization who navigate in your slipstream and to whom you say keep rowing. When you were born you were placed on a small throne on castors while the Stop Shopping Choir sang hosannas, a defining moment. People noticed something nascent about you that persists in your fondness for the first person primordial. You own it. You know why voices die in throats and trees struggle in silence: the deepest trauma cannot spare a sound. If you meet a mystery you do not disturb it with little picks and suction things. You say the shape of  happiness is too fine for capture spray, and it is well to remember the days when plastic boxes snapping shut were all that women had to celebrate. Yet it is not seditious to rebel against a culture like circus music, so cheerful we’d need a cadaver tendon to fix it. That’s what you say. You are hard to fathom as a guttering compass that is neither hush nor howl. I’m thinking of  the time you placed an Aeolian harp in the window, took me by the notebook, and asked me to consider why turkeys bob their heads when they walk and geese don’t though they both waddle. You watched my ethereality show and commiserated when they adorned my rival in a deconsecrated rosary bead bikini and send her to St. Barts while I was remaindered to an orange jumpsuit organ-swiping plot. That century I was betrayed by a dedicated icemaker, you burned a feather pen to revive me. You tried my device that prevents accidental workplace nudity, vetted its magnetic veils, and at Christmas sent fruitcake privacy filters. Remember when I was dismissed as overness consultant? How you resigned in solidarity and grew a sky-colored flower since I could not be satisfied with the sky itself? You gave me a robe of  black silk that floats and does not rustle and advised me to turn from what was finished and hard in the darkness. If  I critiqued the treasure revealer you said do not test its softness against your cheek. Today I raise my glass of wheat grass and atmospheric information to wish you every beyond of  thought in which to consider all that is majorly good. I won’t sing Happy Birthday, a song so overdetermined it sounds bereaved. I’ll sing of  passions that persist in the Elysian Fields. Though shackled to a boulder at the moment, I’m unpacking boxes from your last move, wrapping the contents in recycled moonlight and presenting them to you as objects exactly forgotten and largely what you wanted. I nerve myself  for the encounter.

Amidst the days of pleasant mirth, That throw their halo round our earth; Amidst the tender thoughts that rise To call bright tears to happy eyes; Amidst the silken words that move To syllable the names we love; There glides no day of gentle bliss More soothing to the heart than this! No thoughts of fondness e'er appear More fond, than those I write of here! No name can e'er on tablet shine, My father! more beloved than thine! 'Tis sweet, adown the shady past, A lingering look of love to cast— Back th' enchanted world to call, That beamed around us first of all; And walk with Memory fondly o'er The paths where Hope had been before— Sweet to receive the sylphic sound That breathes in tenderness around, Repeating to the listening ear The names that made our childhood dear— For parted Joy, like Echo, kind, Will leave her dulcet voice behind, To tell, amidst the magic air, How oft she smiled and lingered there.

My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water'd shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me. Raise me a dais of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me.

Light bulbs on a birthday cake. What a difference that would make! Plug it in and make a wish, then relax and flip a switch! No more smoke or waxy mess to bother any birthday guests. But Grampa says, “it’s not the same! Where’s the magic? Where’s the flame? To get your wish without a doubt, You need to blow some candles out!”

35? I have been looking forward To you for many years now So much so that I feel you and I are old Friends and so on this day, 35 I propose a toast to Me and You 35? From this day on I swear before the bountiful Osiris that If I ever If I EVER Try to bring out the Best in folks again I Want somebody to take me Outside and kick me up and Down the sidewalk or Sit me in a corner with a Funnel on my head Make me as hard as a rock 35, like the fellow in The story about the Big one that got away Let me laugh my head off With Moby Dick as we reminisce About them suckers who went Down with the Pequod 35? I ain’t been mean enough Make me real real mean Mean as old Marie rolling her eyes Mean as the town Bessie sings about “Where all the birds sing bass” 35? Make me Tennessee mean Cobra mean Cuckoo mean Injun mean Dracula mean Beethovenian-brows mean Miles Davis mean Don’t-offer-assistance-when Quicksand-is-tugging-some-poor Dope-under-mean Pawnbroker mean Pharaoh mean That’s it, 35 Make me Pharaoh mean Mean as can be Mean as the dickens Meaner than mean When I walk down the street I want them to whisper There goes Mr. Mean “He’s double mean He even turned the skeletons In his closet out into The cold” And 35? Don’t let me trust anybody Over Reed but Just in case Put a tail on that Negro too February 22, 1973

May I never be afraid especially of myself but Muhammed Ali are you telling the truth? Well you’re being true aren’t you and you talk so wonderfully in your body that protects you with physique of voice raps within dance May I never be afraid rocked and quaked the mantilla is lace whose black is oak But if I’m dark I’m strong as my own darkness my strength the universe whose blackness is air only starry lace But if I’m alive I’m strong as life Strong as the violets in Marlon Brando’s fist his dissemblance flourished into truth She took them I’d take me too I do and my Ali I see you a hard bright speck of me the savage formalist authentic deed of gossip a kind body

As if because you lay (deeply embarrassing) inside my body, I could (inconceivable) follow your swift thoughts into their blue immersion even now, stilettoes flickering, or schools of fish maneuvering, first clear and then occluded, though now and then a piercing gleam cuts through; as if the snow reflections that glaze the winter afternoon to porcelain could penetrate the secrets of a skull that happens to have lodged (improbable) inside me once. Your liberation twelve years ago today is the occasion you and your friends are celebrating now behind a door that’s firmly shut. The fantasy you’ve lately been devouring features an evil mage with hourglass eyes. Last week, when you were furious at me (I must have thrown some precious thing away), you swiftly slipped into your parents’ room and turned the bedside clock an hour ahead. Discovered as the culprit, wickedly you smiled. You knew time was my enemy.

This day, whate'er the Fates decree, Shall still be kept with joy by me: This day then let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old; Nor think on our approaching ills, And talk of spectacles and pills. To-morrow will be time enough To hear such mortifying stuff. Yet, since from reason may be brought A better and more pleasing thought, Which can, in spite of all decays, Support a few remaining days: From not the gravest of divines Accept for once some serious lines. Although we now can form no more Long schemes of life, as heretofore; Yet you, while time is running fast, Can look with joy on what is past. Were future happiness and pain A mere contrivance of the brain, As atheists argue, to entice And fit their proselytes for vice; (The only comfort they propose, To have companions in their woes;) Grant this the case; yet sure 'tis hard That virtue, styl'd its own reward, And by all sages understood To be the chief of human good, Should, acting, die, nor leave behind Some lasting pleasure in the mind; Which by remembrance will assuage Grief, sickness, poverty, and age; And strongly shoot a radiant dart To shine through life's declining part. Say, Stella, feel you no content, Reflecting on a life well spent? Your skilful hand employ'd to save Despairing wretches from the grave; And then supporting with your store Those whom you dragg'd from death before? So Providence on mortals waits, Preserving what it first creates. Your gen'rous boldness to defend An innocent and absent friend; That courage which can make you just To merit humbled in the dust; The detestation you express For vice in all its glitt'ring dress; That patience under torturing pain, Where stubborn stoics would complain: Must these like empty shadows pass, Or forms reflected from a glass? Or mere chimæras in the mind, That fly, and leave no marks behind? Does not the body thrive and grow By food of twenty years ago? And, had it not been still supplied, It must a thousand times have died. Then who with reason can maintain That no effects of food remain? And is not virtue in mankind The nutriment that feeds the mind; Upheld by each good action past, And still continued by the last? Then, who with reason can pretend That all effects of virtue end? Believe me, Stella, when you show That true contempt for things below, Nor prize your life for other ends, Than merely to oblige your friends; Your former actions claim their part, And join to fortify your heart. For Virtue, in her daily race, Like Janus, bears a double face; Looks back with joy where she has gone And therefore goes with courage on: She at your sickly couch will wait, And guide you to a better state. O then, whatever Heav'n intends, Take pity on your pitying friends! Nor let your ills affect your mind, To fancy they can be unkind. Me, surely me, you ought to spare, Who gladly would your suff'rings share; Or give my scrap of life to you, And think it far beneath your due; You, to whose care so oft I owe That I'm alive to tell you so.

Passing the American graveyard, for my birthday the crosses stuttering, white on tropical green, the years’ quick focus of faces I do not remember . . . The palm trees stalking like deliberate giants for my birthday, and all the hot adolescent memories seen through a screen of water . . . For my birthday thrust into the adult and actual: expected to perform the action, not to ponder the reality beyond the fact, the man standing upright in the dream.